Linda Russo

A petri dish of ecopoetics, continued

Neither a survey of contemporary practice, nor a conference report, this 'plenary' is a petri dish of ideas occasioned by the 2015 convening of ASLE ( limited by my own ability to digest the conference offerings). The conference presentations of these participants, together, suggested to me a common set of gestures.

Poet and Jacket contributor

Linda Russo currently teaches at the Washington State University. She received her Ph.D. in English from the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and her M.F.A. from Emerson College. She has taught creative writing, literature, women's writing, and expository writing. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Millay Colony for the Arts, and has given poetry readings in Toronto, Portugal and Cuba. Before coming to WSU, Russo directed Sounds Out, a reading series at the University of Oklahoma. Linda's current publication is «Mirth» from Chax Press, 30/01/2007 - 100 pages: In MIRTH, New York native Linda Russo "...speaks for and to this 'girl cold' spacetime, in blazes and remedies, with mirth-scholarly and civic, this work divines"--Elizabeth Treadwell. "*Mirth* (read: not 'comedy' nor 'tragedy') is an exhausted Empire's post-urbanity exposed. How much can we afford to guard (or not guard), and how much should we gamble ourselves out to anyone's game on the street. Linda Russo doesn't so much 'experiment' as throw down a viable metrics for every act"--Rodrigo Toscano.

For many years she has written for Jacket magazine, mainly on issues relating to women and contemporary US poetry. Here are the items she has written, gathered, or compiled for Jacket, with links to each item.

Collom, Nguyen, and the domestic

In my last post, I referred to an at-homeness the “eco” implies (after the Green root oikos), and to alienated/naturalized binaries, that the errant poetics of Will Alexander might help us rethink. Indeed, the “household” trope is a timeworn frame for ecopoetics, promoted in my own rationale for the journal of the same name:

“ ‘Eco’ here signals—no more, no less—the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth. ‘Poetics’ is used as poesis or making, not necessarily to emphasize the critical over the creative act (nor vice versa). Thus: ecopoetics, a house making.”

When I asked poet Robert Hass where he thought “ecopoetics” got started, he cited Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold and Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House (both published in 1969) as the first notable titles in this area. I don’t know who coined the phrase “household Earth,” but I’m sure Stewart Brand, and his Whole Earth Catalog, had something to do with it—and/or Buckminster Fuller, and/or Gary Snyder, and/or that famous photograph of the Earth from space (1968/ ’72), with astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s comment: “It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.”

A different kind of police

There are, indeed, but very few who know how to be idle and innocent, or have a Relish of any Pleasures that are not Criminal; every Diversion they take is at the Expence of some one Virtue or another, and their very first Step out of Business is into Vice or Folly. A Man should endeavour, therefore, to make the Sphere of his innocent Pleasures as wide as possible, that he may retire into them with Safety, and find in them such a Satisfaction as a wise Man would not blush to take.

Note: Emji Spero, an Oakland-based artist and poet exploring the intersections of writing, book art, installation, and performance, visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House in April 2015 to talk about their book almost any shit will do, which uses found language from mycelial studies, word-replacement, and erasure to map the boundaries of collective engagement.